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Who is God? How would someone describe Him? Can God even be described? The late S.M Lockridge once gave a sermon describing who God is and then concluded that God is simply indescribable. In Psalm 71:19, we read "... O God, who is like you?" And yet we also know from further study of the Psalms that one way we draw closer to God is to reflect and acknowledge who He reveals Himself to be and what He has done and is doing. In the coming months, Lily7 hopes to give you a small glimpse into who God is by focusing on a few of His attributes. By no way an exhaustive description of who God is, understanding these attributes has a profound effect on our life and how we view the world. They also serve to remind us of why we worship God, to reflect on who God is and how, like Reverand Lockridge concluded, He truly is indescribable. GOD is Creator by Nikki Rutz God is Creator. He is not just a creator; He is the Creator -- first and foremost. In Genesis 1:1 and following, we are told that God created all that exists. He created everything in the earth and the universe, as well as each of us as human beings. We are further told that God saw His creation and declared it to be "good" (Genesis 1:31). In a sense, we could call God the ultimate "Designer" because His creation is, in fact, His design. Most of us, however, don't fully understand the implications of who God is as "the" Creator (or "the" Designer) of us. If we truly understood that He designed every part of us and how we operate, we would be more sensitive to His instructions on how we work best. The Bible (we might call it God's "Designer Manual") reveals to us how God designed us to operate best. When we step away from operating and embracing how He designed us to work, we miss not only His best for us, but we live out consequences of trying to operate differently than we were intended to function. Adam and Eve first made this error. God told the first humans exactly how we were intended to operate best, as He designed, and they decided not to follow those instructions. The result was what theologians refer to as the "Fall" of mankind: sin entering the world and separating us from God (Genesis 3). We all live in the "echoes of the Fall" ... we see people hurting other people, decisions made that result in harmful consequences to all of God's creation (humans, animals, the earth, etc.), and situations around us that are "not as they should be." These "echoes" are humankind choosing to not follow God's Designer Manual. Rather than trusting that He knows how we work best, we steer our own lives in directions that we think are for our "best" -- only later to realize that we ended up somewhere God never intended. But thank goodness that God loves us (His creation) too much to leave us in these echoes of the Fall. Instead, He sent His only Son to take on the ultimate consequences (death and separation from God) in our place. In His love for us, God gives us an opportunity to claim Jesus Christ as our Lord -- the redemption of mankind -- and to begin the process of being restored back to God. We can know that we are already justified before our Creator through Christ, and we can also know that at the same time we can begin to live more as God intended us from the very beginning. There is power in being able to trust God's instructions for how He created us to live. It allows us to forgive others, because if God instructs us to forgive, then we must work best when we actually do forgive. It allows us to love those around us, because when we seek to love others, we are actually operating as He intended and as we work best. It allows us to have hope and joy in the knowledge that we are being and will eventually be restored back to our Creator ... rescued, if you will, from these echoes of the Fall. As our Creator, He not only knows how we work best, He designed us to work best in certain ways. When we embrace Christ's justification in our place and begin to see Christ's example for us as living how God intended us to live all along, then we know how to live best now. We, simply put, live more like Christ and less like ourselves. We live as God intended us ... as He designed us ... as He created us to exist. I once dropped my cell phone's blue tooth ear piece in a root beer float. True story. Surprisingly (or not ...), it didn't work quite right after that. A friend of mine who had worked in the wireless communication industry told me that cell phones and their accessories were not created nor designed to work in root beer floats. However, the good news, he said, was that I could get it restored back to full usage by following a few key steps. He then reminded me that I should avoid using my ear piece around root beer floats in the future. In case I didn't believe him, though, he encouraged me to refer to the ear piece designer's manual.